


Bénéficiaire

by wanderlustlover



Series: Wanderlustlover's Yuletides [11]
Category: The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus - Failbetter Games, The Night Circus - The RPG Settings
Genre: Chromatic Yuletide, F/M, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Multi, Yuletide, Yuletide 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2015-12-10
Packaged: 2018-05-03 04:28:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5276621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustlover/pseuds/wanderlustlover





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [J (j_writes)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/j_writes/gifts).



**The Storyteller**  
_New York, November 2, 1902_

They are not a month outside of their sixteenth birthday when the second lighting of the bonfire takes place, and Bailey, himself a year younger than they, but this has ever been a game for children. 

One minute they are all dancing on the head of a pin – music ripe and laughter flush within the Inclement Weather Party, in contrast with the persistent whine of gears grinding down all around them – and the next there is brilliance everywhere. 

A rainbow of colors that scorch the sky, visible through the thickest of tent walls, felt in the deepest of places within them, each flash of it, tying and untying, binding and unbinding and binding again, against the scent of billowing smoke and fire, even through the suddenly silent storm. 

It takes only that first moment, for Widget to find the wide eyes of his sister, through the throng of Circus performers who blink and stir as though from a deep sleep. The conversation muted and the music skips to a confused sour beat before it picks itself up again. 

Wobbled music notes growing stronger.  
The gentle murmur of questioning voices.   
Even the rain remembers to start falling again.

The Murray Twins looking to the door, then each other, again, before they both head toward the tent flap that even tied almost closed, blow in the wind and water, making their steps as quiet as ghosts. 

Soundless and wordless, Widgets fingers entwine with those of his sister and they stepped out into the night. Droplets catch like starlight in their red hair and on their black and white jackets, as they walked without question or instruction, without a single word to each other, toward the courtyard. 

Knowing, without why or how, that the circus had changed and they had, too.

~*~ 

It isn’t the courtyard they reach first, but the slender Asian contortionist, standing in the shadows. A cigarette pressed to her lips, with a red ember glowing, as untouched by the downpour as every dark hair upon and stitch of clothing which cast her like a ghost among the newly gathered shadows in the wake of the light. 

“Is it done?” Poppet asked, her voice breaking the chilled silence of the night. 

The music and voices in the distance swallowed entirely as though they no longer existed. Or that, if they did, they belonged to another world. One just out of sync with where they all stood now. Between the worlds. Between a door closing to the past 

“Something is done,” Tsukiko answered, enigmatic, as her dark eyes looked toward the darkness beyond them. Toward the area where the court yard would be, but couldn’t quite be seen yet beyond the nearest tents and the winding circular path that cut them off. 

“You helped,” Widget stated the words, as a glimmer of silver rested in her hands that remained empty. A light in the dark that she had handed over. A light that meant more than a heartbeat. Than any promise. That clung with a million memories. A million broken promises. A light to light the way when all other lights had gone dark. A desperate need, cloaked in silence and darkness and time that hadn’t etch her delicate beauty, for this to be different. 

“Did I?” She asked, more bite than curiosity. A wary rejection, and else.   
He could see it on her. Whispers of reflections barely left from him to read. 

The sharp willingness to do what needed to be done, fierce and protective. At war with a deeper truth, seared in by time, that longed, even stilled and silent within her, for a hope for something better. Something more than she or Celia, or Marco, had ever been granted by this game. 

“You were always going to.” His sister said the words, simply.

Her eyes shifted between the two of them, and the black and white pathway. 

Tsukiko shrugged, cheshire cock of her head, “Were you always going to be late?” 

“We aren’t late,” Widget countered, more certain of it than anything else. Poppet had always been certain that it was coming, and they had both been certain they had left undone the one thing that needed to be done. The one thing that could stop the ruin of all Le Cirque Des Reves, and all within its tightening embrace. 

But something had happened. Something had changed the balance again. 

“This is the way it had to be,” Widget said, as certain of that as Poppet had been, too. 

Tsukiko looked to where Poppet still gazed, and flicked her cigarette. A swirl of brilliant embers fell through the air, through the rain, untouched, until they were extinguished on no more than the air. “Then you best keep going.” 

~*~ 

Bailey was still standing in the courtyard, only feet from the glowing bonfire, when they entered. The white flames threw into relief his damp hair and clothes. His unsteady posture. The red scarf that refused to cling to him and flapped in the wind and the light cleansing rain, like a banner. 

They walked toward him as one, fingers still clasped, but they parted as two, dividing as though they were always meant to, stepping to his sides. Their movement and appearance pulled Bailey out of a daze. His eyes having been closed, now opened as he looked to his right and found Poppet looking up at him. 

“Did it work?” He asked, voice a whisper that should not have been heard above the rain, above the crackle of the fire, and yet both of the Murray Twins heard and understood the words. The need behind it. Dark as the blackest blacks of the Circus. 

Poppet’s smile came, then. A small, but proud and promising thing, as she slipped her small, ungloved hand into Bailey’s. “The Circus is free now.”

“But not-“ Bailey started. 

But Poppet shushed him, still smiling. “It’s better than anything else would have been, and we would have chosen it, if you’d asked us.” 

The feeling of being set adrift and then tied down again. The easier rightness of it. The responsibility. Of the circus. It’s performers. The patrons, new and old, Rêveur and initiate. The ghosts of the past who would slide in and out of the coming future. 

The promise of a future that unfurled itself in her mind as she looked up toward the stars, for the first time in years, like it was a balmed relief and not a yoke. 

Bailey’s eyes followed hers. His stance, even still, trying to adjust to a weight and sight he couldn’t fathom the expanse of yet. “What do I do now?”

“We-“ Widget said, changing the word, gentler than the breeze, but brighter than the fire, as his hand, too, found Bailey’s and Bailey looked over to him. “-begin at the beginning, that never ended-” He said it to the leaping, pure white flames of the bonfire, as well as to Bailey and his sister. “-and we tell our own story now.”


	2. Death & Dominion

The sign reads “ _In Living Memory_ ,” and when you enter the tent a breeze  
ruffles through your hair. It curls around your shoulders, while the warmth  
of the sun shines on your face from somewhere far up above. It is the  
perfect crisp spring day. 

 

The tent walls have melted in luscious green rolling hills dotted with sparse  
trees bearing the smallest of white buds, while others are small maples of  
the most brilliant colors. There are purple mountains in the distance and a  
woolen grey-white sky above you. 

You can smell the scent of melting snow, and the flush earliest growths of this  
spring, tendrils of brightest color shooting from dark earth. Before you, under  
a canopy of two budding trees with joined branches, is a table of light. White  
candles in black votive glass on a white tablecloth. Scattered candles are lit,  
and a slender white taper sits in the middle of the table waiting to light another.

Beyond the table on a raised dais is a figure, that as you approach you realize  
is not just beyond the table, but far away. Across a river that is dark as night  
yet glitters under the light of the sky and the sway of the trees. Around  
and under it, burns a low pyre of delicate white flames. 

The figure is a cooler grey than the sky above and it is still as time. A stone  
deity who stands alone in the dawn of spring, watching the world beyond it,  
and you, features blurred by the distance. 

Yet as you watch it, you could swear that it changes. 

 

The curve of a hip. The tilt of lips. The round of a shoulder. She – you think it  
must be a she, a goddess made of granite or perfect ash – comes only as you stare  
harder. Tugging memories from your mind. A soft ache that interposes that once  
so well known. Of a mother. A lover. A friend. 

When you light your candle,

a shower of cherry blossoms rains from overheard.


	3. Chapter 3

**The Fortune Teller**  
_Glasgow, June, 1903_

The circus continues much the same as it had, with relatively few bumps even as it was taken into new hands, like a small tuxedo kitten. Sly, resilient, and just as enigmatic about its secrets as it had always been, wowing people out of even their simplest questions through amazement. 

It had meant so many things, because there were so many strings connecting the circus to so many places and people, even with the lion’s share resting heavy on Bailey, who toiled unwaveringly under the sudden tutelage of two very different teachers, who needed him to learn all of it that it could be properly balanced in him this time. 

For Poppet and her brother, it had meant even more. While Bailey could no longer leave the circus, and would not have with so much still to understand, they, like the rest of the circus inhabitant felt a loosening of reins, somewhere beyond the brush of skin and air. A choice that had never been there before. 

A choice most of them shrugged off as the tugging of a playful spring zephyr. 

None of the three of them did, but none of the three of them would have chosen different had they been given that night a hundred times over. A choice they all had to embrace, each where they were needed. A choice Bailey had to work from the outside in anew, while The Murray Twins worked from the original ring out. 

Poppet went to London to meet with Madame Padva, while Widget went to Basel to meet with Ethan Baris -- to give them the choice this time that they were denied the first time around. To choose to leave the board, or to choose to be columns holding it up, keeping it going. No longer would there be any blind pieces moved during an unseen game. This was theirs, too, now. 

The choice to say no. The choice to say yes. To live, or die, as they wished now. 

~*~

Not just a new story, but a new world had been born this night.

Beyond them, in the falling rain, the Inclement Weather Party continued where it had paused. The merriment of the members of the circus members who only had rare cause for such a gathering of all of themselves were it not within the confines of the train.

The party who waited under the tree was smaller, more somber. They numbered only five, and if anyone else were to be asked they would say there were only three. The Murray Twins in their matching outfits, and a younger boy, damp from the rain, who looked none the part of any performer. But against the tree, and within the flickers of the candle light, there were two others.

Holding hands, as though they were one being, as though the world began and end where they met. Celia Bowen and Marco Allisdaire, once Illusionist and assistant to Chandresh Lefevre. 

“How do we do it all?” Bailey asked. His voice no more certain or steady than the million flickering shadows thrown on the walls and the dark all around The Wishing Tree. Still it reached all of his companions clear as if he’d struck a bell.

His expression still that of one struggling to understand the confines of his new pact. Theirs. Eyes open, and together. Even though it felt to him like he was the only one in the room who didn’t know anything except that he had made a choice. 

Bailey was looking at the two he’d asked the question of, wavering ghosts, who slipped in and out from shadow, like translucent colored silk. Waiting for their answer. For direction or instruction from the tumult of importance he’d taken upon his shoulders, but Ceila’s gaze shifted from him to Poppet without answering, and his did, too. 

Poppet, curls of red fire nearly dry from the cover, stood quiet to the far side of her brother. Mouth still pressed in a line, under slightly puffy eyes, hands pushed into her coat now. She was the one who had nearly run to Celia only minutes earlier.

It was one thing to know, but it was another thing to see it. To understand, what Celia had done. What she had given up. What she had chosen. First, and finally. How it separated them just as suddenly, and just as finally. 

Her eyelashes still held some of her tears from the first quiet question she’d asked, “You aren’t coming back, are you?” 

The weight in Celia’s eyes then matched the weight in it now, as she looked at the girl. 

“You know,” Celia said, softly. Sympathetic as it was proud. “You’ve always known.”

Poppet let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding, but she didn’t look to Bailey either. Bailey wasn’t the only one who had choices to make that night. Who was the right person, in the right place, at the right time. They’d all been headed toward this day, doing all they could to make this be the one future, the only future, where they succeeded. 

She swallowed. Then, she spoke. “We have to go back to go forward.” 

Celia’s sad smile, the smallest curve of dark moon, as she faded half away and back in the flickering light, was all the answer Poppet needed, pushing her on to make it make more sense than it did to her. Midnight dinners, and the hands on a clock. Opulent costumes, and aching loneliness. Red scarves, and empty graveyards. 

“We have to unknot all the knots that were knotted wrong, and do them right this time.”

~*~

“Are you going to let me in on your secret?” Tara asked, after a sip from her second tea cup. 

“My secret?” Poppet’s confusion at whether she’d missed something traveled in several directions, as her eyebrows furrowed and her own teacup lowered in her hands. 

“You have been here two days now, my dear, and as lovely as your company has been we have finished up all the paperwork, signed and documented them to mint, and yet you still sit there looking as though you are chasing ghosts in the steam of your tea.” 

The younger woman’s cheek flushed a soft pink, affixing the idea closer to words. “There is something else.” There was a beat. “For the circus--” 

“There always is, isn’t there?” Tara’s words where neither harsh, nor whimsical. A soft sadness that wasn’t sadness, an absence you couldn’t see but felt in her every look, hovered around her. 

“It’s for us, too.” Poppets words were as solemn as they were serious, too. “Everyone in the circus. You see. It’s not just Chandresh, Mr. Baris, Mr. Alexander, Madame Padva and you that we needed to see to.”

Two, is unspoken. Two, is not yet. Two, is snow in winding gears and snowdrop tears. 

“That doesn’t account for everyone who was there at the beginning. Only….almost.”

“Ah,” Tara said after a long moments pause. “And this would be why you insisted that my paperwork need not be done in the spring when you spoke with Tante Padva and Ethan? That I could wait to finalize everything when the circus came home to Glasgow?” 

Poppet nodded, gravely, her red curls shaking with the movement. 

“We want everything to be cleared up, this time. Transparent. Everyone aware of the goings on, if they chose it this time. But it needed to be everyone. Everyone needed to be there this time to close the doors and to open them, again, properly. There’s asking and apologies.”

Poppet’s forehead furrowed. “Widge and Baily can explain it better.”

“It’s fine, Poppet,” Tara said, reaching out a hand to touch the Murray’s twins own small one. “We’ve all grown to understand things we once thought we couldn’t. Maybe even wouldn’t have.”

There was an ache, an endlessness in the missing of her old eyes, even though it was time that touched her more now in these last few months. “I think Lainie would have very much liked the plan you all have now, and if you would not mind the company, I would be glad to come with you all when you visit her.”


	4. Apprenticeships

Dangling from the door is a tag, which flutters in the breeze with  
black and white fluttering ribbons. The tag itself is black, and the  
writing upon it is in silver glittering script, reading _“Enter, and do  
as you feel you must.”_

 

The tent flap, half laced, pulls easily back in the breeze, as though it  
has been waiting the whole of the midnight hours for this moment  
when your hand pulls it into action, ushering you into the darkness.

Within, canvas closing soundlessly behind you, is a warm room that l  
ooks nothing like the outside realm of circus tents and black-white  
path you had just left, but instead it is as a cozy nook. At once too  
opulent to be a clerk’s closet, but not yet afforded the graces of a  
gentleman’s study.

Bookshelves full of books frame the walls, rows on rows of titles both  
new and old, leading you to a desk at the end of the space. It is simple  
and well used. There are books left half open upon it, page edges  
fluttering but never flipping. A glass inkwell filled with black liquid  
is open beside a wide manuscript book in the center. 

As you near you can see that left page is pure black, and the right is pure white. 

When you look closer still, you can see that the black page is not in fact  
entirely black. It is a mass of writing. Over and over and over. Black words  
in a million different handwritings. Names and dates, some going back  
beyond the turn of the century. Large, and small, overlapped and looping  
together. Until it looks arcane. 

 

When you look back to the white page, you spy the feather pen to its side. 

The feather is long and white, with a black dipped nib. A&H etched delicately. 

Suddenly you know what you must do. How you, too, become a part of the circus.


	5. Chapter 5

**The Proprietor**  
_Munich, December, 1903_

As effortless as the circus looks from the outside, it was still a carefully constructed show. There was so much for Bailey to learn, that he had never known that he would ever need to know, that school never prepared him for, most of it so amazing that he found himself wondering if he’d fallen asleep and this had become the longest of dreams.

There are many decisions to make and meetings to be held, which have not been held since the last of The Midnight Dinners. Where stories are told, that are truer than most myths, but that would not pass from any of their lips to become them. The scope of the project is still the same, but the weight is portioned out.

They all agree that there will be no new tents introduced during the rest of that first year. 

They arrive in Munich in December, but this time it isn’t Poppet or Widget who go, even after having gone everywhere else to everyone else, but himself. As a personal request even, address in hand, to workshop that has become a pauper’s museum, but which is filled with magic. 

Bailey understands instantly what Poppet meant, leaving him, standing there at the gate, with a kiss, her reddened nose cold against his own cold cheek, but only answering his question of why he needed to go with, You’ll see. 

He does, too. From the moment he steps foot inside the workshop. 

There are clocks on every surface he can see. Small clocks and large clocks. Tall clocks and short clocks. There are clocks in every color and shape imaginable. With the smallest of seconds counted in flower petals barely bigger than a snowflake, and others with hours that change with dancing girls and leaves that shift colors through the seasons. 

They have sent him to the heart of what brought him to them.   
The last name in a list that hasn’t been written and they haven’t been crossing off. 

Friedrick Thiessen. The maker of the great clock, and the very first of the reveurs.   
The man whose death had been the last crack that had led them to where they were now. 

~*~

_Bailey’s face crinkled, haggard with a lack of sleep and something much more exhausting, and, then, was drowned in his fingers. Nothing had happened again. Nothing and nothing and nothing._

_“You have to try again,” the voice of the ghost at his elbow prompted._

_Baily balefully looked over his fingers, feeling every inch his age and his ignorance, as he looked up at the barely-there man who stood, fading in and out of the world, next to his side. “That’s the seventh time it didn’t work.”_

_“You got closer that time.”_

_“I felt like all of my insides were going to come outside.”_

_“You have to push past it,” the apparition insisted, hands floating in the air as though to set a hand on the desk and only realizing right before touching it that his hand would, indeed, only go right through it. “Sometimes it’s going to be like that. Until you get the hang of it. It won’t ever be easy--”_

_“It might be easier to learn how to be an acrobat,” Bailey frowned, too young and too aware of how limited his awareness was and how much broader, how much different, he needed to be now._

_The man had only opened his mouth, when a voice called from behind them both across the tent. “Marco, would you mind giving me a few minutes with Bailey?”_

_Celia Bowen stood, in the same outfit she’d been in since the night of The Second Lighting of the Bonfire, waiting them with patient, but concerned, eyes. Bailey couldn’t say if she’d only just appeared, or if she’d been there a while. He couldn’t always feel them, even though he knew they didn’t leave the circus._

_Marco seemed torn for a long moment, between the importance of the lesson Bailey was not learning and the appearance of Celia, whose very nearness shifted his expression and the color of his eyes into something more pliably soft, but who bade his leave even as she’d just announced herself._

_Then Marco nodded once and, between one blink and another, he was gone._

_Bailey let out a sigh, his shoulders slumped half an inch, bereft of one teacher, but left in the hands of the other. He rubbed his eyes, but looked back to where she stood. “I couldn’t do anything right this time.”_

_“You are already doing better than anyone could have ever expected of you.” She said, shifting, rather like the blink that vanished Marco from his side, making her appear so much closer. A change in where she was that required no real steps._

_“Tell him that,” he said, miserably. Letting himself wallow._

_“He already knows. Marco can be…intense sometime. It is simply that this is deeply important in all respects, Bailey, to him—to both of us. That it is done right. Perhaps, more important than anything else in the world to both of us.”_

_When he looked at her, she blushed, if ghosts could blush, and amended. “Even now.”_

_“But more importantly, Bailey,” Celia continued softly, pressing his name a second time. “Is that we want to do right by you and the choice you have made now, too. We want to teach you what you need to know without you having to go through any of what we did to learn it.”_

~*~

The most important thing is that they do manage it. 

Celia and Marco anchored to the circus, and the circus anchored to Bailey, with Widget holding all the ripples, in every direction, of what the Circus is, who and how it has all come to be, and Poppet, the guardian of the future.

**Author's Note:**

> All additional canon usage, above and beyond the masterful written works within the tome of _The Night Circus_ publication can be found at the following: [The Night Circus Wikia](http://thenightcircus.wikia.com/), Random House & Failbetter Games' [The Night Circus](http://nightcircus.storynexus.com/s), and [The Night Circus RPG Settings](http://thenightcircus.wikia.com/wiki/Night_Circus_RPG_Setting). I, also, tip my head in grateful benefic to the staging and performers of _Cirque du Soleil_ 's _Cirque Italia_ for having one gorgeous and deeply inspiring performance during the time of my researching and writing.


End file.
